Mozilla Add-ons Blog

Featured

by OleksandrGet international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com and display them in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.

“After trying the other weather add-ons when this one went obsolete, I give them up, they were simply inadequate. This was the only add-on that we need in a browser. THANK-YOU for bringing it back it is the only one to have PERIOD…..”

Nominate your favorite add-ons

Featured add-ons are selected by a community board made up of add-on developers, users, and fans. Board members change every six months, so there’s always an opportunity to participate. Stayed tuned to this blog for the next call for applications.

If you’d like to nominate an add-on for featuring, please send it to amo-featured@mozilla.org for the board’s consideration. We welcome you to submit your own add-on!

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.

Add-ons Forum

As we announced before, there’s a new add-ons community forum for all topics related to AMO or add-ons in general. The Add-ons category is one of the most active in the community forum, so thank you all for your contributions! The old forum is still available in read-only mode.

The Review Queues

Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 weeks to review.

308 nominations in the queue awaiting review.

Most updates are being reviewed within 10 weeks.

127 updates in the queue awaiting review.

Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 12 weeks.

334 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

The unlisted queues aren’t mentioned here, but they are empty for the most part. We’re in the process of getting more help to reduce queue length and waiting times for the listed queues.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Extension Signing

We announced that we will require extensions to be signed in order for them to continue to work in release and beta versions of Firefox. The wiki page on Extension Signing has information about the timeline, as well as responses to some frequently asked questions.

A recent update is that Firefox for Android will implement signing at the same time as Firefox for Desktop. This mostly means that we will run the automatic signing process for add-ons that support Firefox for Android on AMO, so they are all ready before it hits release.

Electrolysis

Electrolysis, also known as e10s, is the next major compatibility change coming to Firefox. In a nutshell, Firefox will run on multiple processes now, running content code in a different process than browser code. This should improve responsiveness and overall stability, but it also means many add-ons will need to be updated to support this.

On Monday, June 15, 2015 Mozilla announced on the Add-ons blog a free special edition t-shirt for eligible AMO developers. Eligible developers were requested to sign up via Google Form and asked to input their full name, full address, telephone number and T-shirt size.

This document was mistakenly configured to allow potential public access for less than 24 hours, exposing the response data for 70 developers. As soon as the incident was discovered, we immediately changed the permission level to private access. Other than the developer who discovered and reported this incident, we are not aware of anyone without authorization accessing the spreadsheet.

We have notified the affected individuals. We regret any inconvenience or concern this incident may have caused our AMO developer community.

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.

Add-ons Forum

As we announced before, there’s a new add-ons community forum for all topics related to AMO or add-ons in general. The Add-ons category is already the most active one on the community forum, so thank you all for your contributions! The old forum is still available in read-only mode.

The Review Queues

Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 weeks to review.

272 nominations in the queue awaiting review.

Most updates are being reviewed within 8 weeks.

159 updates in the queue awaiting review.

Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 weeks.

295 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

A number of factors have lead to the current state of the queues: increased submissions, decreased volunteer reviewer participation, and a Mozilla-wide event that took most of our attention last week. We’re back and our main focus are the review queues. We have a new reviewer on our team, who will hopefully make a difference in the state of the queues.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Extension Signing

We announced that we will require extensions to be signed in order for them to continue to work in release and beta versions of Firefox. The wiki page on Extension Signing has information about the timeline, as well as responses to some frequently asked questions.

There’s a small change to the timeline: Firefox 40 will only warn about unsigned extensions (for all channels), Firefox 41 will disable unsigned extensions by default unless a preference is toggled (on Beta and Release), and Firefox 42 will not have the preference. This means that we’ll have an extra release cycle before signatures are enforced by default.

Electrolysis

Electrolysis, also known as e10s, is the next major compatibility change coming to Firefox. In a nutshell, Firefox will run on multiple processes now, running content code in a different process than browser code. This should improve responsiveness and overall stability, but it also means many add-ons will need to be updated to support this.

For a few years we have been running a forum for add-on developers. It’s linked to from the Developer Hub on AMO and has been a good place for discussions about add-ons, particularly add-on development. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the time or resources to keep it properly running and up to date. The software it runs on (phpBB) is notoriously unstable and difficult to manage. It’s time for a change.

We’ve set up an Add-ons category in the Mozilla Community forum. This is the new official home for discussions about add-ons. Its main benefits are better integration with the larger Mozilla community, authentication with Persona (also used on Bugzilla, MDN, and others), reliable maintenance by Community IT, and running on a more modern forum platform called Discourse. With Discourse you can subscribe to posts or entire categories and interact with them like you would with a mailing list, which great for those who (like me) prefer a more old school approach.

This is the current plan for the forum move:

On July 1st, the old forum will be switched to read-only mode. In the meantime we’ll encourage all current forum users to move to the new one.

On September 1st, the old forum will be decommissioned. We might try to keep a static copy of its contents somewhere, but for now you should assume that all content will be lost. We looked into migrating the old content to the new forum, but getting all the right sign-offs (legal, IT, security, etc.) proved to be too much for it to be worthwhile.

Firefox 40 will be released on August 11th. Here’s the list of changes that went into this version that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 40 for Developers, so you should also give it a look.

Extension signing

This is the first version of Firefox that will enforce our new signing requirements. All AMO add-ons have already been signed and we’re in the process of reviewing non-AMO add-ons. In this version, there’s a preference to disable the signing requirement (xpinstall.signatures.required), which will be removed in 41.

Themes

Please let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 40, I’d like to know.

The automatic compatibility validation and upgrade for add-ons on AMO will happen in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on your email if you have an add-on listed on our site with its compatibility set to Firefox 39.

“It was a pleasure to participate in this contest. I would like to thank Mozilla for making this participatory. I would also like to thank all the community members who voted for my design. The biggest reward will be seeing the design printed on t-shirts for add-on developers. They have contributed in making Firefox the best browser ever.”

I post these updates every 3 weeks to inform add-on developers about the status of the review queues, add-on compatibility, and other happenings in the add-ons world.

The Review Queues

Most nominations for full review are taking less than 10 weeks to review.

233 nominations in the queue awaiting review.

Most updates are being reviewed within 7 weeks.

101 updates in the queue awaiting review.

Most preliminary reviews are being reviewed within 10 weeks.

268 preliminary review submissions in the queue awaiting review.

If you’re an add-on developer and would like to see add-ons reviewed faster, please consider joining us. Add-on reviewers get invited to Mozilla events and earn cool gear with their work. Visit our wiki page for more information.

Extension Signing

We announced that we will require extensions to be signed in order for them to continue to work in release and beta versions of Firefox.

Yesterday I posted this update of where we are with signing on AMO. In a nutshell, all AMO extensions for Firefox that passed review have been signed, and all new versions will be signed once they pass review. We have enabled Unlisted extension submission, but it’s currently under testing, so expect some bugs. The major issues will be resolved in the coming week and we’ll make an announcement on this blog to indicate we’re ready for your submissions.

Electrolysis

Electrolysis, also known as e10s, is the next major compatibility change coming to Firefox. In a nutshell, Firefox will run on multiple processes now, running content code in a different process than browser code. This should improve responsiveness and overall stability, but it also means many add-ons will need to be updated to support this.

by Marco Stronati, Kostas ChatzikokolakisEnjoy the useful applications of geolocation while protecting your privacy. It does so by reporting a fake location to websites, obtained by adding a certain amount of “noise” to the real location. The noise is randomly selected in a way that ensures that the real location cannot be inferred with high accuracy.

“Many thanks! That’s just what I need and also I like the idea of hiding it but making the icon visible only if there is a location ask.”

If you have an active extension listing on AMO you probably got a message from us already, explaining how we will automatically sign your add-on and provide it to your users via automatic updates. The automatic signing process will run this week, in batches, and we will notify you when your add-on is signed. Please take some time to test the signed version in the current release version of Firefox and either Developer Edition or Nightly (where Firefox already warns about unsigned extensions).

Next week, we will activate two new features on AMO: signing of new add-on versions after they are reviewed, and add-on submission for developers who wish to have their add-ons signed but don’t want them listed on AMO. We will post another update once this happens. When this is done, all extension developers will be able to have their extensions signed, with enough time to update their users before signing becomes a requirement in release versions of Firefox.

New Developer Agreement

Since we will be signing add-ons that won’t be listed on AMO, we have updated the Add-on Distribution Developer Agreement to cover the new ways in which we will handle add-ons. This document hadn’t been touched for years, so we took our time and significantly updated its contents to reflect how we do things now. Hopefully it is also easier to read than its previous version.

Note that the new agreement will go into effect on June 1st. The version that is displayed on AMO when you submit a new add-on will be updated then, and all active developers on AMO will be notified about it.

If you want to stay up to date with changes related to extension signing, you can follow this blog or check in regularly to the wiki page, where I update the timeline information as it becomes clearer.